Papers › CoMER: Modeling Coverage for Transformer-based Handwritten Mathematical Expression Recognition

CoMER: Modeling Coverage for Transformer-based Handwritten Mathematical Expression Recognition

10 Jul 2022arXiv:2207.04410archive 2025-07-28

Wenqi Zhao, Liangcai Gao

The Transformer-based encoder-decoder architecture has recently made significant advances in recognizing handwritten mathematical expressions. However, the transformer model still suffers from the lack of coverage problem, making its expression recognition rate (ExpRate) inferior to its RNN counterpart. Coverage information, which records the alignment information of the past steps, has proven effective in the RNN models. In this paper, we propose CoMER, a model that adopts the coverage information in the transformer decoder. Specifically, we propose a novel Attention Refinement Module (ARM) to refine the attention weights with past alignment information without hurting its parallelism. Furthermore, we take coverage information to the extreme by proposing self-coverage and cross-coverage, which utilize the past alignment information from the current and previous layers. Experiments show that CoMER improves the ExpRate by 0.61%/2.09%/1.59% compared to the current state-of-the-art model, and reaches 59.33%/59.81%/62.97% on the CROHME 2014/2016/2019 test sets.

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Tasks

DecoderHandwritten Mathmatical Expression Recognition

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Handwritten Mathmatical Expression Recognition CROHME 2014 CoMER ExpRate 58.38 #7 of 17 Archive leaderboard report
Handwritten Mathmatical Expression Recognition CROHME 2016 CoMER ExpRate 56.98 #6 of 16 Archive leaderboard report
Handwritten Mathmatical Expression Recognition CROHME 2019 CoMER ExpRate 59.12 #6 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Handwritten Mathmatical Expression Recognition HME100K CoMER ExpRate 68.12 #5 of 12 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

Test

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